The Best Chicken Noodle Soup...Ever. (The third recipe in a series for lazy people who don't actually enjoy cooking, but do very much enjoy eating.) |
martha, martha, martha The first and most important thing I have to relay today is that Martha Stewart has posted a recipe on her website for home-made Marshmallow Peeps. Only she calls them "marshmallow treats" because I guess the candy name "Peeps" is copyrighted or something. Or maybe just because Martha Stewart is so affected that she has to come up with her own special name for everything, or at least pronounce it in some weird way so as to seem more classy. Like how she pronounces the word scallops, "skoll-ups." And how she's like, "this is my very favorite brand of twine, you can only find it at this little twine and notions store down the road from my spice garden." Who has a favorite brand of twine, for chrissake? Oh Martha. I hate you, yet I love you. Today was a pretty interesting day at work because stuff actually happened. One of my patients, a 35 year-old woman who'd had a stroke a week ago, suddenly started having chest pain and difficulty breathing. She ended up being transferred from our floor to the Cardiac Care Unit, and as of my leaving work today, still nobody quite knows what's going on with her. Obviously, it's very rare for someone so young to have a stroke, and it's also rare for someone so young to decompensate like this, for whatever reason, so (Marge Gunderson voice) it really would be quite a coincidence if the two weren't...you know...connected. We just haven't figured out what the connection is yet. And that's kind of hard to deal with, especially when the patient's husband is cornering you in the hallway and saying, "Dr. Michelle [he calls me this for some reason, even though I've reminded them several times that I'm not a doctor yet], you gotta give it to me straight. You're the only one that tells me anything. What's going on here? Why is this happening?" While meanwhile, his formerly healthy wife is lying in bed, stuporous, incontinent, blood pressure dropping, and breathing like a dog on a hot day. Why is this happening? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. My Neurology rotation ends tomorrow. I had an OK time, but I'm also ready for it to be over. Tonight we're taking our two Neuro residents out for a celebratory dinner at this Tex-Mex place on the Upper West Side. Our intention is to get them nice and tanked on cheap margaritas, so that they get disinhibited and spill all the dirt about the other residents and attendings that we've worked with. Should be a good time. xo Michelle |
Thursday . March 7 . 2002 . 4:15pm |
martha, martha, martha The first and most important thing I have to relay today is that Martha Stewart has posted a recipe on her website for home-made Marshmallow Peeps. Only she calls them "marshmallow treats" because I guess the candy name "Peeps" is copyrighted or something. Or maybe just because Martha Stewart is so affected that she has to come up with her own special name for everything, or at least pronounce it in some weird way so as to seem more classy. Like how she pronounces the word scallops, "skoll-ups." And how she's like, "this is my very favorite brand of twine, you can only find it at this little twine and notions store down the road from my spice garden." Who has a favorite brand of twine, for chrissake? Oh Martha. I hate you, yet I love you. Today was a pretty interesting day at work because stuff actually happened. One of my patients, a 35 year-old woman who'd had a stroke a week ago, suddenly started having chest pain and difficulty breathing. She ended up being transferred from our floor to the Cardiac Care Unit, and as of my leaving work today, still nobody quite knows what's going on with her. Obviously, it's very rare for someone so young to have a stroke, and it's also rare for someone so young to decompensate like this, for whatever reason, so (Marge Gunderson voice) it really would be quite a coincidence if the two weren't...you know...connected. We just haven't figured out what the connection is yet. And that's kind of hard to deal with, especially when the patient's husband is cornering you in the hallway and saying, "Dr. Michelle [he calls me this for some reason, even though I've reminded them several times that I'm not a doctor yet], you gotta give it to me straight. You're the only one that tells me anything. What's going on here? Why is this happening?" While meanwhile, his formerly healthy wife is lying in bed, stuporous, incontinent, blood pressure dropping, and breathing like a dog on a hot day. Why is this happening? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. My Neurology rotation ends tomorrow. I had an OK time, but I'm also ready for it to be over. Tonight we're taking our two Neuro residents out for a celebratory dinner at this Tex-Mex place on the Upper West Side. Our intention is to get them nice and tanked on cheap margaritas, so that they get disinhibited and spill all the dirt about the other residents and attendings that we've worked with. Should be a good time. xo Michelle |
Bikini Briefs |
What you will need: - One roasted chicken. That's right, a chicken that's already been cooked. You can get it in the rotisserie section of you local supermarket. Or you can get one of those vacuum-packed Perdue ones in the cold cuts section. It's all good. - 6-9 cups of chicken broth. The less time you have to cook, the more chicken broth you should use. - 3-6 cups of water. The less time you have to cook, the less water you should use. The chicken broth + water constant should be 12 cups total. - Some carrots - Some celery - Sometimes I like spinach in there too. - Dill weed. Lots and lots of dill weed. - Noodles. I like egg noodles, but any kind of spoonable pasta is OK (read: not linguini). What to do: Get a big pot. Put the whole roasted chicken in there. Then put the broth and water in there. Again, to restate, the less time you have to cook, the higher the chicken broth to water ratio should be. If you have more time to cook (like > 3 hours) you can put more water in, because you have more time to get the soup all flavorful. Flavorful is the watchword here. That's why it's good to use a roasted chicken. The roasty flavor and seasonings on the chicken impart deliciousness into the soup. OK, is all that stuff in the pot? Turn on the fire. You can chop up the carrots and celery while the soup is getting heated up. How many vegetables to put in is totally a matter of personal preference, but let me just warn you that if you go hog wild with the carrots, your soup will get this sickening sweet taste, because carrots have a lot of sugar in them. I would suggest maybe 4-6 normal-sized carrots (not those giant donkey carrots) and an equivalent number of celery stalks. Dump the chopped up vegetables into the pot. Add a lot of dill weed. A LOT. You can't go wrong with the dill, it's so mild. But you can't go without it either, it's arguably the key ingredient. (My sister knows the importance of dill, because one time I was trying to make this soup, and we had no dill in the house, and I went on a rampage, making a special trip to the grocery store just to get another bottle of the stuff.) Now let the whole thing go for about an hour and a half. You don't have to watch it like a hawk, it isn't doing anything exciting. After an hour and a half, the chicken should be nice and tender, so you can start to take off the skin and debone the poor thing. I think it's nice to leave the skin on for most of the time the soup is cooking, because of the aforementioned flavors, but I do also think you should take it out before you eat the soup, because ew, skin. I recommend using tongs for the deboning. Not only is it easy at this point, but it's quite a nice anatomy lesson too. After you've taken all the yuckies out of the chicken, you can add the spinach, if you want to go that route. Usually I wait until the soup is almost done to add the spinach because it tends to turn everything green if it cooks for too long, and it's so drapey that it would get caught on the chicken bones as you were trying to remove them. Cover the pot and simmer for at least another half hour, even longer if you have the time. VERY IMPORTANT: Don't add the noodles until the end! And unless you're eating the whole pot of soup at once, don't add noodles directly to the pot! Make them on the side and add them to each individual bowl of soup. The reason is that if you leave noodles in the soup for too long, they suck up all the broth and grow to enormous sizes, to look like giant, dead, slug-creatures. And then your soup is ruined and you will cry. Always keep soup and noodles separate until the last second, hear? If you stuck by the broth-to-water-proportions algorithm, you shouldn't need to add any salt or other seasonings. Dish it out and enjoy. Serves: 6-8 people, maybe more, I'm not sure, since I never really checked. Maybe I should entertain more. |
The Best Chicken Noodle Soup...Ever. (The third recipe in a series for lazy people who don't actually enjoy cooking, but do very much enjoy eating.) |
